Talk:Biladol Orb Awtani

Requested move 2 December 2016

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: NO CONSENSUS. KSF T C 17:25, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Biladol Orb Awtani → Bilād al-ʻArab Awṭānī – The article title needs to be romanized correctly. Johanna-Hypatia (talk) 11:15, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment since there is no references or extranal links, and this is not primarily in English -- could you please provide some references to support this article should be properly romanized as requested? Tiggerjay (talk) 21:43, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Reply to comment Sure. Here is a search in the Library of Congress for the phrase "Bilād al-ʻArab." It turned up 39 books with that phrase in the title. Here is an example of the word Awṭānī in a book title, displayed in Arabic and correctly romanized by the ALA-LC romanization system, which is the one used here in Wikipedia. It's already spelled correctly and just needs the diacritics. The title of this book of political cartoons, Bilād al-ʻunf awṭānī (the country of violence is my homeland), is a satiric takeoff on the familiar song title. As for the spelling "orb," it seems that in old Classical Arabic the obscure form عُرْب ʻurb can be a synonym of the much more familiar word عَرَب ʻarab. See Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, bk. 1, p. 1993, col. 1. Generally the variant forms/synonyms of words you find in Classical Arabic lexicons like this exist for use in Arabic prosody, words of different metrical feet to fit the meter of a line as needed. The text in question is a poem and it turns out my reading of it was wrong: it actually is ʻUrb in the song. My bad; with my poor eyesight, I ought to have zoomed in and looked more closely at the song text where the vowels are clearly spelled out. I retract my original request. Anyhow, the correct romanization is Bilād al-ʻUrb Awṭānī, and that's my corrected move request. Johanna-Hypatia (talk) 17:18, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Oppose - in the absence of any strong WP:COMMONNAME usage, it doesn't make sense to me to impose lots of unusual diacritics on this name, which affect readability of the title, and aren't part of the actual language concerned (self-evidently, as Arabic has a non-Latin script). The present title is preferable. &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 09:45, 29 December 2016 (UTC)
 * There's nothing unusual about the diacritics. They belong in the standard romanization system (ALA-LC) used by Wikipedia. There is not going to be any WP:COMMONNAME found for this title, because (1) it hardly occurs in English sources and (2) in the absence of any standardized romanization system, roman spellings are ad hoc and haphazard (as in this article's title) and therefore pretty useless. That leaves the standard romanization system as the only thing to fall back on. There is no vowel "o" in literary Arabic. A cleaned-up title is preferable. Johanna-Hypatia (talk) 07:14, 31 December 2016 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.